I think the idea is that he didn't actually invent a time machine, but just said he did as an elaborate prank because he just knew that people would ask him to kill Hitler (somehow I think this comic idea was founded not on Wikipedia but on TVTropes) so he could pretend to have understood them wrong and frustrate them or something.

Hey, I've heard weaselsoup has been having trouble getting her depths fathomed? I hope she's taking advantage of JUBILEE FEVER. There's nothing like a mass waving of tiny flags to get any man primed for a close encounter of the slurred kind.

"Slurred" in the sense of drunkenness, because your speech is slurred. I don't know. I used one innuendo and couldn't think of any more.

that's what she meant - remember that rob is visible from every point on earth, and he is also unaffected by events that take place on a mere national scale, especially when said nation is barely the size of his breakfast

I don't like 1063 because it's plain stupid. Nazism, Holocaust and WWII did not happen just because of the actions of Hitler alone; it happened as consequence of the WWI, the economic crisis, the russian revolution and many other economic, political and social events that were way beyond Hitler's influence. Hitler was just a smart and opportunistic bastard who was "at the right place in the right time", if a random douche travelled in the past and killed Hitler some other asshole would take over his place and do more or less the same shit he would have done. Besides that, the reason that racism and authoritarism is shunned upon today is because of all that fucked up shit that happened in WWII, so Hitler's actions were not all bad in the end.

Why does David Starkey have to exist? I don't particularly care about his desperate need for controversy or his ridiculously stereotypical upper-class prejudices, but his creepy love affair with the monarchy disgusts me immensely.

ASIDE TO AUDIENCE: I just tried audio captcha for the first time, it's somehow even more indecipherable than the text. Sounds like a mix between a busy pub, a numbers station, and a very bleak summary of "wuthering heights".

Holy crap that is bad. I wonder if you have to get every word right, because you only seem to get one go at it (as it changes each time) - maybe if you download the audio it isn't as bad. I retried it a few times but was never able to identify every word.

Considering the damn things are everywhere, I wonder if we're slowly making the web completely unusable by blind users. Oh well!

I held out and used Lynx as my primary browser as long as I could. I lost personal access to a Unix shell account around 2001 and had to go with Netscape at that point. My parents had shell access till maybe 2003; they lived way out in the country, and it was at least another 5 years between when the ISP started charging extra for a shell account and when they were finally able to get DSL instead of dial-up; they just had to use a graphical browser in that period and wait forever for pages to load.

Back when people actually designed webpages with text-based browsers in mind, I'm sure it was a lot easier for blind people to use the internet (not to mention the people stuck on dial-up).

Fuck Randall for thinking everybody has high speed internet (can't remember exactly which xkcd made that assumption, but it gets my goat).

You might want to consider the difference between making a web page accessible to blind people/admitting the obviously true fact that not every single person has high-speed Internet and "ahering (sic) to the lowest common denominator".

Uh, 11:11, horses are more than a gateway for a pre-pubescent girl's awakening sexuality. They have served humanity well throughout history, and will serve well again once the oil market collapses and electric cars are found to be an inadequate substitutes. Plenty of people think they're cool.

Not me, though. I find all those bulging muscles a little grotesque, and their massive dicks just remind me of my own inadequacy.

I got fox, but the description didn't describe me very well at all apart from saying I'm a good match for a cougar. Then I read the descriptions for the other possibilities and found none of them really hit the mark. Still, at least it was more accurate than my star sign and birth number.

"Also, GOOMHR. Today I tried barefoot running for the first time (for nontrivial distances [about a mile]). Probably should have done it on grass not pavement/tarmac, as I have blisters on my feet now. When my feet toughen up, I will be free of the tyranny of shoes! At least, in places where it doesn't matter if people look strangely at me."

In response to a comic that was clearly criticising these shoes.

I was hoping to quote somebody claiming that they're hacking for your feet, but it was not to be. I still have hope that somebody will say it eventually.

You know those disconcerting guys who graduated years ago but seem to keep being drawn back to campus when they should really have moved on with their lives a long time since? I would have forgotten about those weirdos if Randall didn't keep acting as the digital equivalent.

Yes, it's a doctor who puts greater value patient interpretation more than his own diagnosis. He rejects absolute notions of illness and argues that the concept of health is a construction that says more about the mores of the society that defines its boundaries than it does of the intrinsic physical well-being of any individual.

You eat the world. At first, you feel godlike as you incorporate every living creature and all the inanimate matter on Earth into your being. As you dribble the last few atoms of this world into your now enormous maw, you realize that you are not the same person who took on this enormous task. In consuming your world you have taken upon all its features leaving you to wonder whether you have in fact eaten the world - or if it has at you.

Goodbye Janet DoeThough I never knew you at allYou had the grace to wear your wigWhile those around you scrawledThey scrawled into MSPaintAnd they whispered into your brainThey set you on the milk pumpAnd they made you change your name

chorus:And it seems to me that you're Randall's wifeA mistake but not a sinHaving no real man to cling toWhen Big C set inAnd I would have liked to have bought youBut I was just outbidYour bosom burned out long beforeYour potential to be milked for sympathy by a failing comic who desperately needs a new creative angle and to look like more than a big kid with no real responsibilities ever did

Stick figure female geek was toughThe toughest role you ever playedRandall he created a superstarAnd pain was the price you paidEven when you diedOh the trolls still hounded youAll the hate blogs had to sayWas that Megan was found lactating

[repeat chorus]

Goodbye Janet DoeThough I never knew you at allYou had the grace to wear your wigWhile those around you scrawled

From the young man browsing xkcdsucksWho sees you as something more than sexualMore than just our Megan Munroe

Once the haunt of a clique of webcomic afficionados and second rate IT workers, it degenerated (further) to little more than an online expression of jumping up and down like a toddler and insisting that that the battle against xkcd has not been lost.

But it has been lost. And xkcd is here to stay, as popular as ever.

Go gentle into that good night, raging not about the dying of what's right.

Ooh. A glimpse into Randall's soul. Of course, the joke doesn't work because nobody is really expecting the next Einstein to be working in a Swiss patent office. But it's a nice dream for the temporarily embarrassed scientist who's stuck patent clerking, sound engineering, or webcomicing. Maybe you could be the next Einstein!

That's a pretty long shot though. If Randall wants to make a contribution to science, he could go to grad school and end up putting out a few papers that get cited by a dozen colleagues. That's life. Not everybody gets to be a world-famous scientist. But a being a competent professional scientist is achievable with a little hard work. Or maybe he could flame out of academia and end up receiving a Nobel prize while working at a Toyota dealership. That's a little tough to plan for though.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure Einstein was keeping on top of his field while he was at the patent office, not watching Mythbusters and drawing stick figures. Good luck with your dreams, Randall.

"If Randall wants to make a contribution to science, he could go to grad school and end up putting out a few papers that get cited by a dozen colleagues."

The trick is to release something useful (software, data collections, whatever) and include in the license a requirement to cite your paper on the topic to use the data. Bingo, dozens, sometimes hundreds of citations. The only other way is to significantly advance research and that requires a lot of work, a lot of luck, or both.

But a being a competent professional scientist is achievable with a little hard work.Science is 99% lucky innate intelligence and 1% hard work. That's the only reason most people aren't scientists, though scientists would like to pretend they're just harder working than you.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

Divided into two convenient categories, based on whether you think this website

Rob's Rants

When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.